IPv6 is on the marketers radar

Geert Bosch bosch at adacore.com
Sat Feb 12 04:17:01 UTC 2011


On Feb 11, 2011, at 15:43, Fred Baker wrote:

> Anyone that uses a residential router (Linksys, D-Link, Netgear, etc) is likely to need to upgrade that, most likely by buying a new one. Set-top boxes are generally IPv4; anyone with a TV is likely to need to upgrade at least the software. Skype is not yet IPv6-capable, and will need one an update. "The ISPs will take care of this" is a really empty hope. The ISPs will take care of their part, but users should expect that there will be things jiggling over the coming couple of years.

Honestly, I can't quite see the big deal for home users. I'm using
an Apple Airport Extreme, and setting it up with a IPv6 tunnel from
HE was quite straightforward. Sure, I don't expect the average user
to go through these steps, but they could easily be automated and
rolled out as part of a firmware update (which is a routine matter
already) . If larger ISP's provide their own tunnels, they could
use private IPv4 space for customers to tunnel IPv6 over, and the
only issue would be a few router settings to change.

According to test-ipv6.com my home network has now a score of 10/10
for both IPv4 and IPv6. Didn't take very long to do,  maybe 10
minutes.
 Initial speed tests show only a marginal slowdown of IPv6 compared
 to IPv4.

However, if I look at what would be involved at my $dayjob to support
IPv6, that would be far more involved. What's more, I cannot justify
the cost to support IPv6 only clients, as there are none yet. For
the foreseeable future, people will have (NATed or not) IPv4
connectivity, so content providers are fine without IPv6. I won't
have to worry about this until most major content providers support
IPv6-only clients.

So, I think we'll transition to a situation where for some purposes
(Skype, gaming, file-sharing) there will be a benefit for (tunneled)
IPv6 compared to (NATed) IPv4, but for simple content providers
there will still be no incentive to leave IPv4.

For the software there is a similar scenario. Clients typically use
a web browser or other high-volume popular application. It is easy
to add IPv6 support to these. However, content providers use many
different pieces to provider their sites, including custom interfaces
to databases etc. It's a huge task to make all of those work with
IPv6.

Again, it seems it is far easier to deal with the relatively
homogeneous base of users for IPv6, compared to the fragmented and
irregular market of content providers.

  -Geert



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